Category: music

My MSc thesis is here. The reader may find many loose ends, which may well get tied up through my PhD research.

Abstract:In the context of the live coding of music and computational creativity, literature examining perceptual relationships between text, speech and instrumental sounds are surveyed, including the use of vocable words in music. A system for improvising polymetric rhythms with vocable words is introduced, together with a working prototype for producing rhythmic continuations within the system. This is shown to be a promising direction for both text based music improvisation and research into creative agents.

The haskell source for my vocable synthesis system used in my previous screencasts is now available. I’ve been having fun rewriting this over the last couple of days, and would appreciate any criticism of my code.

Inspired by the notation of canntaireachd. Made with hsc (Haskell client for scsynth). As ever, code available under GPL
on application.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. It’s nice to describe a sound in this way but to use it in music the sound has to change over time otherwise it gets repetitive and therefore boring in many situations. I think I either have to develop ways of manipulating these strings programmatically, or ways of manipulating how they are interpreted. Both approaches would involve livecoding of course…

I’ve returned to this subject, having many good ideas to explore from recent discussions with Tim Blackwell. We thought rendering some whole songs would work nicely. I didn’t fancy playing with my Java code again so wrote some Haskell, which I’m rather pleased with. The source is available (feedback welcome!). It does the the mapping using seeks on the output file, allowing impressive memory efficiency via Haskell’s lazy evaluation.

Some examples of some indie synth pop, disco, minimal techno (*3) and industrial gabba below, click on the images for the full versions but beware, they are rather large, around 5M each. Mouseover for the original track names.